How to delete your ChatGPT account
- Cancel any mobile subscription first. Deleting the account cancels what OpenAI bills directly — it does not cancel an Apple App Store subscription, and once the account is gone you have no ChatGPT-side way to sort it out. Check Google Play too. Full routes on our cancellation page.
- Export anything you want to keep, from Settings → Data controls. After deletion nothing is recoverable through the interface, the API or support.
- Delete in Settings → Account. Next to Delete account select Delete, enter your account email or phone number, type
DELETEwhen prompted, then select Permanently delete my account. - Or use the Privacy Portal if you cannot sign in: Make a Privacy Request → I have a consumer ChatGPT account → Delete my ChatGPT account, then verify. You must be able to verify the email or phone already linked to the account.
OpenAI's own article spends its first screen talking you out of it.
Before the instructions, the help article lists four things people delete their account to achieve and shows how to achieve each without deleting anything: stop paying (cancel instead), change your email address, change how you sign in, or remove a conversation. That ordering is a fair signal — most people arriving at this question want one of those four, not permanent deletion.
The subscription warning is the expensive one. Deleting the account cancels subscriptions billed directly by ChatGPT, but an Apple App Store subscription survives it. OpenAI's instruction is to cancel mobile subscriptions before deleting. Do it the other way round and you are being charged for a product you can no longer log into.
There is now an ads-account warning too, added since OpenAI began selling advertising. If your OpenAI email also accesses an Ads account, deleting the OpenAI account may lock you out of it — and may not pause active campaigns, which keep serving and accruing charges. If you are the only person with access, OpenAI's guidance is to contact Support before deleting.
On timing: data is deleted within 30 days, with a limited set retained longer where law requires or permits. The account cannot be reactivated, but the same email address can start a fresh account after 30 days — provided the old one was deleted rather than deactivated, and was not disabled for a policy violation. A phone number carries a separate rule: it can verify a first API key for up to three accounts, and deleting an account does not reset that count.
What deletion does and doesn't reach.
If the goal is privacy rather than departure, three narrower tools exist and all of them are reversible in a way deletion is not:
- Delete individual chats, or all of them at once, from Settings → Data controls. Deleted chats leave OpenAI's systems within 30 days. See deleting your history.
- Turn off model training — "Improve the model for everyone" in Data Controls. Chats stay in your history but stop feeding training.
- Use Temporary Chat, which is not saved to history, creates no memories, is not used for training, and is deleted after 30 days.
Which of those you want depends on what you are actually worried about — our page on whether ChatGPT chats are private takes that apart properly.
Self-service deletion is not available in ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, Edu or ChatGPT for Healthcare workspaces. Those accounts belong to the organisation that provisioned them, and only that organisation can remove them — OpenAI's article sends you to your own admin.
This catches people who signed up personally, then had their account absorbed into a work plan. The button is simply not there any more.
Deleted accounts cannot be reactivated. A new account with the same email address is possible after 30 days, assuming full deletion rather than deactivation.
Two exclusions are worth knowing before you delete: addresses previously attached to an Enterprise organisation cannot be re-registered, and neither can addresses disabled for a terms or policy violation. And the error message "You do not have an account because it has been deleted or deactivated" means exactly what it says — waiting 30 days does not clear a deactivation, only a deletion.
Smaller moves that solve the same problem.
Account deletion is permanent and irreversible, so it is worth ten seconds of checking whether one of these is the thing you meant. Each is reversible; deletion is not.
Frequently asked.
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